But Rehtaeh, rocking on the floor, looked to her mother and aunt for answers, wanting to know if they also felt something was wrong, and why. “Was that rape?” she asked.

‘TOO DRUNK TO CONSENT’

The day after Rehtaeh died in April, another distraught teenager came asking for Parsons’ help.

A boy, one of the four who was with Rehtaeh that night in 2011, shut himself in his bedroom and cried when he heard the girl had been in the hospital after attempting suicide, he told Parsons in a Facebook message obtained by The Chronicle Herald.

He said he wanted to explain, openly and honestly, what had happened that night and prove to Parsons that he hadn’t done anything wrong. Grieving and unwilling to meet with him, Parsons told him to say what he had to say.

When the boy finished his saga, she wrote him a brief message asking him to focus on one recurring theme in his tale: “She was DRUNK,” Parsons wrote.

Rehtaeh “was too intoxicated to know what she wanted,” her mother said. She couldn’t consent to sex, even if “she was not kicking and screaming.”

Parsons hadn’t disputed any of the facts the boy had laid out, but he became agitated.

He vowed that his story was not made up. He offered to take a polygraph test. He said he would never admit to raping Rehtaeh.

CROSSING THE LINE

Rehtaeh’s death has made many Nova Scotians think hard about teenagers, alcohol and consent, Parsons among them.

“They don’t even know what consensual sex is,” she says. “They don’t even know that the other person’s supposed to be participating and wanting it.”

Rehtaeh was allegedly raped by four boys at a classmate’s home, 17 months before she died on April 7. A photo from that night spread like wildfire among teens via text message.

She told police she had been drinking vodka, and in the photo she is shown vomiting — a fact Chronicle Herald reporters have seen acknowledged on social media by the boy pictured with her.

The question of how much the girl drank and how it affected her goes to the heart of her case. But students involved are unsure of those answers, and of what the Criminal Code has to say about alcohol and consent.

After all, they say, they rarely think about those things. They rarely think about whether it’s OK, legally or morally, to have sex with someone who’s drunk.

“Honestly, I do not think that 85, at least 85 per cent of people, per cent of boys, would be like, ‘Oh, are you OK?’” says a former classmate of Rehtaeh’s, who is now 16.

Rehtaeh’s mom, Leah Parsons: “Nobody’s teaching boys what we teach girls — how to act, what not to do, be careful, don’t lead them on, don’t do this. Nobody’s telling boys how to respect a girl . . . and I think that’s a big problem." (ADRIEN VECZAN / Staff)

“Honestly, from experience, from seeing boys at parties — I think that if a girl is willing, if a girl’s not puking, if a girl’s not passed out, if a girl’s willing to do things with a guy, that honestly I don’t think that a guy would just check in with her first.”

Rehtaeh did puke that night. Still, her classmate did not believe her friend was raped.

She told as much to police. Her account appears to have played a key role in their investigation. She was with Rehtaeh that night and was interviewed about a month afterwards, by her recollection. It was months later that police interviewed the boys involved, according to the classmate and Parsons.

The Supreme Court of Canada has made it clear that if someone is drunk to the point of incapacity, she or he can’t consent. It also says sexual partners need to take steps to be sure the other person is freely consenting.

The classmate gauged Rehtaeh’s drunkenness that night by how much she believes the 15-year-old consumed when both of them were there — about half a pint of vodka, or the equivalent of roughly five shots, she says — and by how Rehtaeh was acting earlier in the evening, before her friend left.

“She wasn’t passed out or anything at all,” the girl says. “She was completely alert. I mean, obviously, you could probably tell that she had a little bit in her. But like, she wasn’t passing out — she was talking to me. We were having conversations.”

Rehtaeh’s mother remembers her telling police she drank somewhere closer to nine shots over the course of the night.

At one point, after leaving the house for a cigarette, the classmate saw Rehtaeh “doing stuff” in a bedroom with two of the boys, one of whom was the classmate’s ex-boyfriend, she says. Angry, she asked Rehtaeh to leave, but Rehtaeh laughed and wouldn’t go, she says.

She tried to put Rehtaeh’s clothing on, but Rehtaeh wouldn’t co-operate. The classmate left and later returned with her mother. For 45 minutes, the pair struggled, unsuccessfully, to dress Rehtaeh and take her from the house.

“I can’t throw her over my back and freaking, like, bring her with me,” says the girl, who later reconciled with Rehtaeh and says she was extremely upset by her death.

Though she had described Rehtaeh as alert, barely drunk, she also recalls her mother talking sternly to the boys about how to take care of someone in Rehtaeh’s condition.

“She was like, ‘You need to make sure Rehtaeh’s fine. You need to make sure that she’s in bed. If she gets any worse, call me.’”

The classmate says she begged her mother not to call Rehtaeh’s mother because she didn’t want to get Rehtaeh in trouble.

They left the 15-year-old with the boys, who promised to take good care of her.

The girl says she regrets that she was unable to make Rehtaeh leave with her.

Before Parsons learned that her daughter had had any sexual contact that night, she was concerned that Rehtaeh had been very drunk because the girl showed her a huge bruise on her hip and bruises on her wrists, Parsons says.

She thought Rehtaeh had fallen down. Later, photographs of the bruising became part of the evidence collected in a medical examination.

Aside from the photo of Rehtaeh vomiting, it’s unclear what other evidence exists about how much Rehtaeh had to drink, or what steps police took to collect that information.

The classmate says many things about that night bothered her and “freaked me out.” But in her view, the boys acted as many would.

“The boys, it still was wrong for them to do that. Like, it’s wrong, you know? But they’re teenage boys, they’re 15, 16 years old … had alcohol in their system,” she says.

Plus, what happened that night was not how rape looks, she says.

“(One boy’s) mother was in the house, literally a door over, or maybe two doors over from (the boy’s) room,” she says.

“So I would think that if four people were raping a girl, that the mother would wake up, you know? Like, if you’re getting raped by four people, or two people, or one person even, you’re going to be screaming, you’re going to be yelling, you’re going to be crying.”

What if you’re really drunk? she is asked.

“Uh-huh. But I don’t know,” she says.

“I just feel like something would be … just something.”

EDUCATION NEEDED

Uncertainty about alcohol and sex doesn’t surprise Jackie Stevens.

The community educator at the Avalon Sexual Assault Centre in Halifax speaks with thousands of people every year about sexual assault and the law.

When she visits classrooms of teens and tweens, Stevens describes different scenarios and asks them to identify if there’s anything wrong. They start off very certain, she says.

A coach and a child? Yes, that’s sexual abuse. A stranger? Yes.

“When you start to bring in if it’s someone that they know, opinions will vary, depending on the situation,” Stevens says.

“And as soon as alcohol is included … almost everyone will then say it’s not sexual assault. Or it’s a really heated debate: ‘How do you know it’s not drunk sex? How do you know it’s sexual assault? Well, what if she consented before she got drunk?’

“They’re not seeing that if you’re really, really drunk, or you’re unconscious, or you’re asleep, or you’re semi-coherent and you have to be carried around, they’re not seeing that as not consenting or not participating.”

The public school curriculum does cover sexual assault and consent. Education Minister Ramona Jennex says all Grade 7 students are sent home with a 130-page book discussing sex, relationships, sexual assault, sexually transmitted infections and birth control.

“It’s a reality nowadays that students already know an awful lot about sex,” Jennex says. “We need to make sure that they’re not basing their knowledge on misconceptions.”

According to the “sex book,” as kids call it, a 2002 survey found that 35 per cent of Nova Scotia students in grades 7 to 12 who had had sex during the previous year said they had unplanned sex while they were drunk or high.

One section of the book lists which activities can be considered sexual assault and what does and doesn’t constitute consent.

“There can be no legal consent when a person is drunk, drugged, asleep or passed out,” the book notes. “Everyone has the right to change his or her mind at any point — even during sex.”

Jennex says the material in the book is also covered verbally by teachers in the classroom.

“It is in our curriculum outcome that every child needs to have this information delivered to them in classroom.”

But Stevens believes, based on conversations with teachers, parents, nurses and Health Department staff, that those classroom discussions don’t always happen.

“Some teachers may not be teaching about sexual assault as part of that, or it’s taught in a very general kind of way,” she says. “It depends on who’s teaching it and how comfortable they are with those issues.”

She’s heard from school staff who have been stymied by their schools’ administrators when they’ve tried to promote awareness of sexual assault.

Some administrators refused to acknowledge May as Sexual Assault Awareness Month because it would “bring up issues and memories in relation to Rehtaeh Parsons” or may lead people to think the school has a problem with sexual assault, Stevens says.

Two girls who grew up with Rehtaeh in Cole Harbour are emphatic that sexual assault was never mentioned in any of their classrooms.

Birth control, yes, but not consent, says Megan Koziel, 17, who went to Primary, middle and high school with Rehtaeh.

Kids learn from their families, sometimes from movies and TV, and often from seeing each other’s pictures and comments on social media, say Megan and Breonna McInnis, also 17.

Some of the boys they know talk to each other about their “kill count,” or how many girls they’ve had sex with, Breonna says.

Drinking plays a big part in those counts, the girls say.

While adults might like to think that teenagers only occasionally misunderstand how drunk their sexual partners are, Breonna says that’s optimistic.

“Usually, um, they would see the drunkest girl — ‘I’ll just go for her,’” she says.

If a boy already has a crush on a certain girl, he might pay her special attention, the girls say. But not in a way that would be considered romantic.

“If the girl doesn’t want it, like, when she’s sober, and then he’s probably thinking, ‘Oh, if I get her drunk, she’ll go for it,’” Megan says.

“Keep asking, keep asking when she’s drunk and then she’ll finally give up, or she’s so drunk that she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

“So, like, she thinks that she wants to do it, but then later on, she’s like, ‘What did I do?’” Breonna adds. “And then the guy’s like … whatever.”

Another young man from the community says that kind of behaviour is an exception, and most local teenagers use common sense to avoid having sex with someone who’s extremely drunk.

“Normally you can just tell by the way she’s walking, if she’s slurring her words” or vomiting, says Devon MacDougall, 19.

“I know that the people that I associate with, if somebody’s beyond the point of understanding what’s going on, then it’s pretty much a no go.”

However, even for well-intentioned people, it can be hard to make that decision, says the Cole Harbour District High School graduate.

“If you yourself are also close to that point, then obviously you’re not going to be able to make a fully thoughtful judgment,” MacDougall says.

Peers he sees making drunken calculations are toeing a fuzzy line.

“Like, say you had four shots, and you see a girl that’s had six shots, then some people would be like, ‘Oh, she only had two shots more than me, she must be fine.’ Without taking into consideration that it affects people differently.”

The boys involved in this case and their families have not responded to requests for interviews.

MacDougall believes most young people do know the Drunk Means No rule, but they don’t always follow it.

“They don’t think it’s a really big deal,” he says.

“I think it’s more or less, ‘Oh yeah, I hooked up with this girl, we were both plastered.’ And it’s nothing.”

WHO IS TEACHING BOYS?

It wasn’t too long before that November night that Rehtaeh had started asking for advice about how to handle boys, Parsons recalls.

Yes, you can hold a boy’s hand, she remembers telling her daughter at 12. Yes, you can kiss him.

But she added a warning: be careful with boys, especially at parties.

“It doesn’t matter how much you think you can trust them. You can’t.”

It was a word of caution that any mother could have offered her soon-to-be-teenage daughter.

In the aftermath of Rehtaeh’s death, Parsons wonders what kind of talk — if any — boys get about how to deal with girls.

“Nobody’s teaching boys what we teach girls — how to act, what not to do, be careful, don’t lead them on, don’t do this,” Parsons says. “Nobody’s telling boys how to respect a girl … and I think that’s a big problem.”

DEFINITION OF SEXUAL CONSENT

No consent is obtained where:

a) the agreement is expressed by the words or conduct of a person other than the complainant.

b) the complainant is incapable of consenting to the activity.

c) the accused induces the complainant to engage in the activity by abusing a position of trust, power or authority.

d) the complainant expresses, by words or conduct, a lack of agreement to engage in the activity.

e) the complainant, having consented to engage in sexual activity, expresses, by words or conduct, a lack of agreement to continue to engage in the activity.

It is not a defence that the accused believed that the complainant consented to the activity that forms the subject matter of the charge where: